How the statistical revolution changes (computational) linguistics
Mark S. Johnson · 2009
This paper discusses some of the ways that the "statistical revolution" has changed and continues to change the relationship between linguistics and computational linguistics. I claim that it is more useful in parsing to make an open world assumption about possible linguistic structures, rather than the closed world assumption usually made in grammar-based approaches to parsing, and I sketch two different ways in which grammar-based approaches might be modified to achieve this. I also describe some of the ways in which probabilistic models are starting to have a significant impact on psycholinguistics and language acquisition. In language acquisition Bayesian techniques may let us empirically evaluate the role of putative universals in universal grammar.